Yesterday I was helping a friend out with his Vista problem. Vista turned out to be unsalvageable and a faulty DVD drive prevented installation of win7 or vista.
So I installed Kanotix which I had brought on a 2gb pendrive.

Problem: USB wifi adapter, well known make, recognized by OS.
Modem + Wifi router, setup works fine on my eee 701 running Crunchbang linux.
But on kanotix networkmanager makes problems, does not accept the WPA2 passphrase, takes a long time to connect and keeps disconnecting.
It seems to be some problem with letting the user access the network.
I did not quite know what to look for and had little time.
I made sure the user had access to net, netdev groups.

btw at first knetworkmanager would not let the user connect at all. This worked after I gave root privileges to the user ...

But using the wifi connection continues to be a pain.

Anyone else seen this, have any idea what to do?

Could of course be some problem with network or router setup, I had no time to look into that.

Sometimes network-manager is a bit problematic but usually i can connect with it. With 1 wlan and 1 internal nic you uninstall it (then run: dhclient eth0) and use wicd instead. It does not ask for a passphrase but you have to specify it of course with advanced settings options.

DeepDayze

Titel: RE: Knetworkmanager problem Verfasst am: 22.05.2011, 01:34 Uhr

Anmeldung: 08. Dez 2005
Beiträge: 299

if you do switch to wicd, get the wicd-kde package to get KDE integration

coyotl

Titel: RE: Knetworkmanager problem Verfasst am: 22.05.2011, 10:46 Uhr

Anmeldung: 05. Apr 2011
Beiträge: 79
Wohnort: Norway

wicd-kde, no such package. Am I missing some special repo?

coyotl

Titel: RE: Knetworkmanager problem Verfasst am: 22.05.2011, 11:39 Uhr

Anmeldung: 05. Apr 2011
Beiträge: 79
Wohnort: Norway

Wicd gave the same problem when testing on my own machine, Gigabyte USB wifi adapter and wifi mobile internet modem.
Disconnect then 'Bad passphrase' when trying to reconnect - the same passphrase it just accepted.
It seems to be a connection issue - the adapter should not be too far from the router it seems. Moving it closer helps but that is not always practical..

coyotl

Titel: RE: Knetworkmanager problem Verfasst am: 23.05.2011, 14:17 Uhr

Anmeldung: 05. Apr 2011
Beiträge: 79
Wohnort: Norway

solution: ndiswrapper

Dramatic improvement over free driver with both my friend's and my machine.

other DLINK usb adapter, this changed from completely unusable to good performance

edit: now realize I should get a PCI wifi adapter, better signal, not affected by other connected usb devices

a very good idea as most of those USB wifi devices aren't that great and really limited by the speed of the USB bus plus interference from other USB devices will also affect them

coyotl

Titel:Verfasst am: 22.11.2011, 11:50 Uhr

Anmeldung: 05. Apr 2011
Beiträge: 79
Wohnort: Norway

I've learnt a little more about these devices now. I was trying to use one of these wifi mobile modems and it was just useless. swent back to the trusty E220 and 4-5 m of cable to the best spot in my place and now i mostly get HDSPA/WCDMA speeds.